Stage Notes: Lucky Guy Captures the City and Career Nora Ephron Loved

In an essay from her 2010 collection I Remember Nothing: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, the late Nora Ephron looked back at her early career in journalism, capturing the exhilaration of laboring in that profession during the heady days when print was king. “You truly come to believe that you are living in the center of the universe,” she wrote, “and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.” The name of that essay is “Journalism: A Love Story,” and it also could have been the subtitle of her funny, tough, and elegiac—if ultimately thin—play Lucky Guy, which opened Monday night at the Broadhurst Theater, starring Tom Hanks as Mike McAlary, the fabled 1980s and 1990s tabloid columnist who dug up dirt, lived hard, and became convinced that the world (or at least New York City, which amounts to the same thing) revolved around him, before winning a Pulitzer Prize and dying of cancer at age 41.

Let’s cut to the chase: How is Hanks in his Broadway debut? Well, it’s been a tough season for screen stars on the New York stage—Jessica Chastain and Katie Holmes were disappointments in, respectively, The Heiress and Dead Accounts;Scarlet Johansson is failing to set the box office afire in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the less said about Emilia Clarke in Breakfast at Tiffany’s the better. But, of course, this is Tom Hanks, and he has not only generated tons of good will and hefty advance sales for Lucky Guy, he’s terrific in it, taking to the stage with the polish of a seasoned pro and the gusto of a new kid getting his first break. With a droopy mustache, the hint of a gut, and a hangdog cast to his features, the ever-boyish Hanks is playing against type as the profanity-spewing, booze-swilling, self-regarding McAlary. But even when his character is betraying a colleague, writing a nasty column, or leaving his wife home alone while he roams the city chasing leads and carousing, he exudes the fundamental decency and geniality that are the hallmarks of his persona. On stage, as on film, Hanks is the rare star who knows how to turn up his own wattage while also letting his fellow actors shine.

We meet most of those fellow actors in the opening moments of the play: a Greek chorus of hard-bitten newsmen (names familiar to aficionados of tabloid journalism and pre-Bloomberg New York), gathered in a midtown saloon to hold a wake for their fallen comrade and tell his story. The uniformly top-notch cast includes Courtney B. Vance,Peter Gerety, and Hanks’s former Bosom Buddies costar Peter Scolari as McAlary’s newsroom mentors, colleagues, and rivals; Christopher McDonald as the sharp-dressing lawyer Eddie Hayes; and Stephen Tyrone Williams as Abner Louima, whose horrific story McAlary brought to the attention of a shocked city and nation. (The wonderful Maura Tierney has the unenviable task of playing McAlary’s long-suffering wife, Alice.) The restlessly inventive stage wizard George C. Wolfe directs with his customary flair, verve, and cinematic fluidity, keeping the proceedings moving like a gleaming, well-oiled machine. He is helped by **David Rockwell’**s sets, **Toni-Leslie James’**s costumes, Jules Fisher and **Peggy Eisenhauer’**s lighting, and the black-and-white-headlines-come-alive projections by Batwin & Robin Productions, all of which capture the aura and energy of McAlary’s heyday.

Despite all the skill, talent, and love that have gone into its creation—and the swift pace with which it moves—Lucky Guy remains episodic rather than dramatic. And ultimately, we don’t come away knowing much more about McAlary than the facts of his life and the vicissitudes of his personality. Hanks’s skillful, winning, and at times very moving performance goes a long way toward making up for that flaw, but the hole at the center of Lucky Guy keeps it from being a fully satisfying play. Still, though it may not have the masterful incisiveness of Ephron’s best work as an essayist, it has all the heart of her best movies and, like them, is besotted with New York. Watching a play about a man’s succumbing to cancer, it’s hard not to think about how haunted by her own mortality Ephron (who died of leukemia last June) must have been when she wrote it. And it’s hard not to see Lucky Guy as her valedictory wave to a vanished era in journalism and the city that she loved, as well as to life itself and the many admirers that she left behind.